I sometimes feel I do too much critiquing and too little suggesting. Like, somehow, I’m the 400 pound, mullet-sporting guy on his 3rd beer at the baseball game yelling at the 2nd baseman to hustle. So, every once in a while on a Wednesday I’ll try to balance the scales a bit and put my own ideas up for display, analysis, and critique. (view all “WID” posts).

When I think about the complexity of planning vacations and ski travel, I can’t help but think about apps.

You read right.

Not just any apps, but web apps. Sites that provide tiered services to their patrons. Each has a lengthy list of features, possibilities, and combinations. Yet each, perhaps simply mimicking each other, has found a way to organize this proposition of value for their visitors:

These charts, used nearly universally with apps, do three things:

• Reduce option overload from 100s of features to 3-4 levels
• Improve the ability to compare combinations
• Allow the visitor to more easily see the value in the products provided

They also provide a starting point. Most will indicate which plan is the “most popular”. Visitors can look at that, realize many people purchase that combination, and start from their as they evaluate their own needs.

When I think about skiing, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a similar tier-ing that could be applied to resort vacations.

What I’d Do
There are some people that surely want to plan their own vacations from the ground up. I won’t argue that.

There are others, however, who are overwhelmed with the options, unsure of what they should combine for an optimal vacation. If I were you, I’d take a page from the web app playbook, dig into your data, find the common combinations of vacation types, and organize them into a little chart like this for easy comparison and booking.

Leave the option to build their own, but give them a starting point of features, pricing tiers, and options. Show them what’s the “most popular” and allow them to buy it with a few clicks (or a phone call) or build their own vacation off of that.

That’s what I’d do.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.